Villette

HE LONG VACATION.

Following Madame Beck’s fête, with its three preceding weeks of
relaxation, its brief twelve hours’ burst of hilarity and dissipation,
and its one subsequent day of utter languor, came a period of reaction;
two months of real application, of close, hard study. These two months,
being the last of the “année scolaire,” were indeed the only genuine
working months in the year. To them was procrastinated—into them
concentrated, alike by professors, mistresses, and pupils—the main
burden of preparation for the examinations preceding the distribution
of prizes. Candidates for rewards had then to work in good earnest;
masters and teachers had to set their shoulders to the wheel, to urge
on the backward, and diligently aid and train the more promising. A
showy demonstration—a telling exhibition—must be got up for public
view, and all means were fair to this end.

I scarcely noted how the other teachers went to work; I had my own
business to mind; and my task was not the least onerous, being to
imbue some ninety sets of brains with a due tincture of what they
considered a most complicated and difficult science, that of the
English language; and to drill ninety tongues in what, for them, was an
almost impossible pronunciation—the lisping and hissing dentals of the
Isles.

The examination-day arrived. Awful day! Prepared for with anxious care,
dressed for with silent despatch—nothing vaporous or fluttering now—no
white gauze or azure streamers; the grave, close, compact was the order
of the toilette. It seemed to me that I was this day, especially
doomed—the main burden and trial falling on me alone of all the female
teachers. The others were not expected to examine in the studies they
taught; the professor of literature, M. Paul, taking upon himself this
duty. He, this school autocrat, gathered all and sundry reins into the
hollow of his one hand; he irefully rejected any colleague; he would
not have help. Madame herself, who evidently rather wished to undertake
the examination in geography—her favourite study, which she taught
well—was forced to succumb, and be subordinate to her despotic
kinsman’s direction. The whole staff of instructors, male and female,
he set aside, and stood on the examiner’s estrade alone. It irked him
that he was forced to make one exception to this rule. He could not
manage English: he was obliged to leave that branch of education in the
English teacher’s hands; which he did, not without a flash of naïve
jealousy.

A constant crusade against the “amour-propre” of every human being but
himself, was the crotchet of this able, but fiery and grasping little
man. He had a strong relish for public representation in his own
person, but an extreme abhorrence of the like display in any other. He
quelled, he kept down when he could; and when he could not, he fumed
like a bottled storm.

On the evening preceding the examination-day, I was walking in the
garden, as were the other teachers and all the boarders. M. Emanuel
joined me in the “allée défendue;” his cigar was at his lips; his
paletôt—a most characteristic garment of no particular shape—hung dark
and menacing; the tassel of his bonnet grec sternly shadowed his left
temple; his black whiskers curled like those of a wrathful cat; his
blue eye had a cloud in its glitter.

“Ainsi,” he began, abruptly fronting and arresting me, “vous allez
trôner comme une reine; demain—trôner à mes côtés? Sans doute vous
savourez d’avance les délices de l’autorité. Je crois voir en je ne
sais quoi de rayonnante, petite ambitieuse!”

Now the fact was, he happened to be entirely mistaken. I did not—could
not—estimate the admiration or the good opinion of tomorrow’s audience
at the same rate he did. Had that audience numbered as many personal
friends and acquaintance for me as for him, I know not how it might
have been: I speak of the case as it stood. On me school-triumphs shed
but a cold lustre. I had wondered—and I wondered now—how it was that
for him they seemed to shine as with hearth-warmth and hearth-glow.
He cared for them perhaps too much; I, probably, too little.
However, I had my own fancies as well as he. I liked, for instance, to
see M. Emanuel jealous; it lit up his nature, and woke his spirit; it
threw all sorts of queer lights and shadows over his dun face, and into
his violet-azure eyes (he used to say that his black hair and blue eyes
were “une de ses beautés”). There was a relish in his anger; it was
artless, earnest, quite unreasonable, but never hypocritical. I uttered
no disclaimer then of the complacency he attributed to me; I merely
asked where the English examination came in—whether at the commencement
or close of the day?

“I hesitate,” said he, “whether at the very beginning, before many
persons are come, and when your aspiring nature will not be gratified
by a large audience, or quite at the close, when everybody is tired,
and only a jaded and worn-out attention will be at your service.”

“Que vous êtes dur, Monsieur!” I said, affecting dejection.

“One ought to be ‘dur’ with you. You are one of those beings who must
be kept down. I know you! I know you! Other people in this house see
you pass, and think that a colourless shadow has gone by. As for me, I
scrutinized your face once, and it sufficed.”

“You are satisfied that you understand me?”

Without answering directly, he went on, “Were you not gratified when
you succeeded in that vaudeville? I watched you and saw a passionate
ardour for triumph in your physiognomy. What fire shot into the glance!
Not mere light, but flame: je me tiens pour averti.”

“What feeling I had on that occasion, Monsieur—and pardon me, if I say,
you immensely exaggerate both its quality and quantity—was quite
abstract. I did not care for the vaudeville. I hated the part you
assigned me. I had not the slightest sympathy with the audience below
the stage. They are good people, doubtless, but do I know them? Are
they anything to me? Can I care for being brought before their view
again to-morrow? Will the examination be anything but a task to me—a
task I wish well over?”

“Shall I take it out of your hands?”

“With all my heart; if you do not fear failure.”

“But I should fail. I only know three phrases of English, and a few
words: par exemple, de sonn, de mone, de stare—est-ce bien dit? My
opinion is that it would be better to give up the thing altogether: to
have no English examination, eh?”

“If Madame consents, I consent.”

“Heartily?”

“Very heartily.”

He smoked his cigar in silence. He turned suddenly.

“Donnez-moi la main,” said he, and the spite and jealousy melted out of
his face, and a generous kindliness shone there instead.

“Come, we will not be rivals, we will be friends,” he pursued. “The
examination shall take place, and I will choose a good moment; and
instead of vexing and hindering, as I felt half-inclined ten minutes
ago—for I have my malevolent moods: I always had from childhood—I will
aid you sincerely. After all, you are solitary and a stranger, and have
your way to make and your bread to earn; it may be well that you should
become known. We will be friends: do you agree?”

“Out of my heart, Monsieur. I am glad of a friend. I like that better
than a triumph.”

“Pauvrette!” said he, and turned away and left the alley.

The examination passed over well; M. Paul was as good as his word, and
did his best to make my part easy. The next day came the distribution
of prizes; that also passed; the school broke up; the pupils went home,
and now began the long vacation.

That vacation! Shall I ever forget it? I think not. Madame Beck went,
the first day of the holidays, to join her children at the sea-side;
all the three teachers had parents or friends with whom they took
refuge; every professor quitted the city; some went to Paris, some to
Boue-Marine; M. Paul set forth on a pilgrimage to Rome; the house was
left quite empty, but for me, a servant, and a poor deformed and
imbecile pupil, a sort of crétin, whom her stepmother in a distant
province would not allow to return home.

My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords.
How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless! How vast
and void seemed the desolate premises! How gloomy the forsaken
garden—grey now with the dust of a town summer departed. Looking
forward at the commencement of those eight weeks, I hardly knew how I
was to live to the end. My spirits had long been gradually sinking; now
that the prop of employment was withdrawn, they went down fast. Even to
look forward was not to hope: the dumb future spoke no comfort, offered
no promise, gave no inducement to bear present evil in reliance on
future good. A sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on
me—a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things
earthly. Alas! When I had full leisure to look on life as life must be
looked on by such as me, I found it but a hopeless desert: tawny sands,
with no green fields, no palm-tree, no well in view. The hopes which
are dear to youth, which bear it up and lead it on, I knew not and
dared not know. If they knocked at my heart sometimes, an inhospitable
bar to admission must be inwardly drawn. When they turned away thus
rejected, tears sad enough sometimes flowed: but it could not be
helped: I dared not give such guests lodging. So mortally did I fear
the sin and weakness of presumption.

Religious reader, you will preach to me a long sermon about what I have
just written, and so will you, moralist: and you, stern sage: you,
stoic, will frown; you, cynic, sneer; you, epicure, laugh. Well, each
and all, take it your own way. I accept the sermon, frown, sneer, and
laugh; perhaps you are all right: and perhaps, circumstanced like me,
you would have been, like me, wrong. The first month was, indeed, a
long, black, heavy month to me.

The crétin did not seem unhappy. I did my best to feed her well and
keep her warm, and she only asked food and sunshine, or when that
lacked, fire. Her weak faculties approved of inertion: her brain, her
eyes, her ears, her heart slept content; they could not wake to work,
so lethargy was their Paradise.

Three weeks of that vacation were hot, fair, and dry, but the fourth
and fifth were tempestuous and wet. I do not know why that change in
the atmosphere made a cruel impression on me, why the raging storm and
beating rain crushed me with a deadlier paralysis than I had
experienced while the air had remained serene; but so it was; and my
nervous system could hardly support what it had for many days and
nights to undergo in that huge empty house. How I used to pray to
Heaven for consolation and support! With what dread force the
conviction would grasp me that Fate was my permanent foe, never to be
conciliated. I did not, in my heart, arraign the mercy or justice of
God for this; I concluded it to be a part of his great plan that some
must deeply suffer while they live, and I thrilled in the certainty
that of this number, I was one.

It was some relief when an aunt of the crétin, a kind old woman, came
one day, and took away my strange, deformed companion. The hapless
creature had been at times a heavy charge; I could not take her out
beyond the garden, and I could not leave her a minute alone: for her
poor mind, like her body, was warped: its propensity was to evil. A
vague bent to mischief, an aimless malevolence, made constant vigilance
indispensable. As she very rarely spoke, and would sit for hours
together moping and mowing, and distorting her features with
indescribable grimaces, it was more like being prisoned with some
strange tameless animal, than associating with a human being. Then
there were personal attentions to be rendered which required the nerve
of a hospital nurse; my resolution was so tried, it sometimes fell
dead-sick. These duties should not have fallen on me; a servant, now
absent, had rendered them hitherto, and in the hurry of holiday
departure, no substitute to fill this office had been provided. This
tax and trial were by no means the least I have known in life. Still,
menial and distasteful as they were, my mental pain was far more
wasting and wearing. Attendance on the crétin deprived me often of the
power and inclination to swallow a meal, and sent me faint to the fresh
air, and the well or fountain in the court; but this duty never wrung
my heart, or brimmed my eyes, or scalded my cheek with tears hot as
molten metal.

The crétin being gone, I was free to walk out. At first I lacked
courage to venture very far from the Rue Fossette, but by degrees I
sought the city gates, and passed them, and then went wandering away
far along chaussées, through fields, beyond cemeteries, Catholic and
Protestant, beyond farmsteads, to lanes and little woods, and I know
not where. A goad thrust me on, a fever forbade me to rest; a want of
companionship maintained in my soul the cravings of a most deadly
famine. I often walked all day, through the burning noon and the arid
afternoon, and the dusk evening, and came back with moonrise.

While wandering in solitude, I would sometimes picture the present
probable position of others, my acquaintance. There was Madame Beck at
a cheerful watering-place with her children, her mother, and a whole
troop of friends who had sought the same scene of relaxation. Zélie St.
Pierre was at Paris, with her relatives; the other teachers were at
their homes. There was Ginevra Fanshawe, whom certain of her
connections had carried on a pleasant tour southward. Ginevra seemed to
me the happiest. She was on the route of beautiful scenery; these
September suns shone for her on fertile plains, where harvest and
vintage matured under their mellow beam. These gold and crystal moons
rose on her vision over blue horizons waved in mounted lines.

But all this was nothing; I too felt those autumn suns and saw those
harvest moons, and I almost wished to be covered in with earth and
turf, deep out of their influence; for I could not live in their light,
nor make them comrades, nor yield them affection. But Ginevra had a
kind of spirit with her, empowered to give constant strength and
comfort, to gladden daylight and embalm darkness; the best of the good
genii that guard humanity curtained her with his wings, and canopied
her head with his bending form. By True Love was Ginevra followed:
never could she be alone. Was she insensible to this presence? It
seemed to me impossible: I could not realize such deadness. I imagined
her grateful in secret, loving now with reserve; but purposing one day
to show how much she loved: I pictured her faithful hero half conscious
of her coy fondness, and comforted by that consciousness: I conceived
an electric chord of sympathy between them, a fine chain of mutual
understanding, sustaining union through a separation of a hundred
leagues—carrying, across mound and hollow, communication by prayer and
wish. Ginevra gradually became with me a sort of heroine. One day,
perceiving this growing illusion, I said, “I really believe my nerves
are getting overstretched: my mind has suffered somewhat too much a
malady is growing upon it—what shall I do? How shall I keep well?”

Indeed there was no way to keep well under the circumstances. At last a
day and night of peculiarly agonizing depression were succeeded by
physical illness, I took perforce to my bed. About this time the Indian
summer closed and the equinoctial storms began; and for nine dark and
wet days, of which the hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf,
dishevelled—bewildered with sounding hurricane—I lay in a strange fever
of the nerves and blood. Sleep went quite away. I used to rise in the
night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. A rattle of
the window, a cry of the blast only replied—Sleep never came!

I err. She came once, but in anger. Impatient of my importunity she
brought with her an avenging dream. By the clock of St. Jean Baptiste,
that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes—a brief space, but sufficing
to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer a nameless
experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a
visitation from eternity. Between twelve and one that night a cup was
forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but
filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering,
brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips,
tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank and woke, I thought
all was over: the end come and past by. Trembling fearfully—as
consciousness returned—ready to cry out on some fellow-creature to help
me, only that I knew no fellow-creature was near enough to catch the
wild summons—Goton in her far distant attic could not hear—I rose on my
knees in bed. Some fearful hours went over me: indescribably was I
torn, racked and oppressed in mind. Amidst the horrors of that dream I
think the worst lay here. Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved
me well in life, met me elsewhere, alienated: galled was my inmost
spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future. Motive
there was none why I should try to recover or wish to live; and yet
quite unendurable was the pitiless and haughty voice in which Death
challenged me to engage his unknown terrors. When I tried to pray I
could only utter these words: “From my youth up Thy terrors have I
suffered with a troubled mind.”

Most true was it.

On bringing me my tea next morning Goton urged me to call in a doctor.
I would not: I thought no doctor could cure me.

One evening—and I was not delirious: I was in my sane mind, I got up—I
dressed myself, weak and shaking. The solitude and the stillness of the
long dormitory could not be borne any longer; the ghastly white beds
were turning into spectres—the coronal of each became a death’s-head,
huge and sun-bleached—dead dreams of an elder world and mightier race
lay frozen in their wide gaping eyeholes. That evening more firmly than
ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and
Hope a false idol—blind, bloodless, and of granite core. I felt, too,
that the trial God had appointed me was gaining its climax, and must
now be turned by my own hands, hot, feeble, trembling as they were. It
rained still, and blew; but with more clemency, I thought, than it had
poured and raged all day. Twilight was falling, and I deemed its
influence pitiful; from the lattice I saw coming night-clouds trailing
low like banners drooping. It seemed to me that at this hour there was
affection and sorrow in Heaven above for all pain suffered on earth
beneath; the weight of my dreadful dream became alleviated—that
insufferable thought of being no more loved—no more owned, half-yielded
to hope of the contrary—I was sure this hope would shine clearer if I
got out from under this house-roof, which was crushing as the slab of a
tomb, and went outside the city to a certain quiet hill, a long way
distant in the fields. Covered with a cloak (I could not be delirious,
for I had sense and recollection to put on warm clothing), forth I set.
The bells of a church arrested me in passing; they seemed to call me in
to the salut, and I went in. Any solemn rite, any spectacle of
sincere worship, any opening for appeal to God was as welcome to me
then as bread to one in extremity of want. I knelt down with others on
the stone pavement. It was an old solemn church, its pervading gloom
not gilded but purpled by light shed through stained glass.

Few worshippers were assembled, and, the salut over, half of them
departed. I discovered soon that those left remained to confess. I did
not stir. Carefully every door of the church was shut; a holy quiet
sank upon, and a solemn shade gathered about us. After a space,
breathless and spent in prayer, a penitent approached the confessional.
I watched. She whispered her avowal; her shrift was whispered back; she
returned consoled. Another went, and another. A pale lady, kneeling
near me, said in a low, kind voice:—“Go you now, I am not quite
prepared.”

Mechanically obedient, I rose and went. I knew what I was about; my
mind had run over the intent with lightning-speed. To take this step
could not make me more wretched than I was; it might soothe me.

The priest within the confessional never turned his eyes to regard me;
he only quietly inclined his ear to my lips. He might be a good man,
but this duty had become to him a sort of form: he went through it with
the phlegm of custom. I hesitated; of the formula of confession I was
ignorant: instead of commencing, then, with the prelude usual, I
said:—“Mon père, je suis Protestante.”

He directly turned. He was not a native priest: of that class, the cast
of physiognomy is, almost invariably, grovelling: I saw by his profile
and brow he was a Frenchman; though grey and advanced in years, he did
not, I think, lack feeling or intelligence. He inquired, not unkindly,
why, being a Protestant, I came to him?

I said I was perishing for a word of advice or an accent of comfort. I
had been living for some weeks quite alone; I had been ill; I had a
pressure of affliction on my mind of which it would hardly any longer
endure the weight.

“Was it a sin, a crime?” he inquired, somewhat startled. I reassured
him on this point, and, as well as I could, I showed him the mere
outline of my experience.

He looked thoughtful, surprised, puzzled. “You take me unawares,” said
he. “I have not had such a case as yours before: ordinarily we know our
routine, and are prepared; but this makes a great break in the common
course of confession. I am hardly furnished with counsel fitting the
circumstances.”

Of course, I had not expected he would be; but the mere relief of
communication in an ear which was human and sentient, yet
consecrated—the mere pouring out of some portion of long accumulating,
long pent-up pain into a vessel whence it could not be again
diffused—had done me good. I was already solaced.

“Must I go, father?” I asked of him as he sat silent.

“My daughter,” he said kindly—and I am sure he was a kind man: he had a
compassionate eye—“for the present you had better go: but I assure you
your words have struck me. Confession, like other things, is apt to
become formal and trivial with habit. You have come and poured your
heart out; a thing seldom done. I would fain think your case over, and
take it with me to my oratory. Were you of our faith I should know what
to say—a mind so tossed can find repose but in the bosom of retreat,
and the punctual practice of piety. The world, it is well known, has no
satisfaction for that class of natures. Holy men have bidden penitents
like you to hasten their path upward by penance, self-denial, and
difficult good works. Tears are given them here for meat and
drink—bread of affliction and waters of affliction—their recompence
comes hereafter. It is my own conviction that these impressions under
which you are smarting are messengers from God to bring you back to the
true Church. You were made for our faith: depend upon it our faith
alone could heal and help you—Protestantism is altogether too dry,
cold, prosaic for you. The further I look into this matter, the more
plainly I see it is entirely out of the common order of things. On no
account would I lose sight of you. Go, my daughter, for the present;
but return to me again.”

I rose and thanked him. I was withdrawing when he signed me to return.

“You must not come to this church,” said he: “I see you are ill, and
this church is too cold; you must come to my house: I live——” (and he
gave me his address). “Be there to-morrow morning at ten.”

In reply to this appointment, I only bowed; and pulling down my veil,
and gathering round me my cloak, I glided away.

Did I, do you suppose, reader, contemplate venturing again within that
worthy priest’s reach? As soon should I have thought of walking into a
Babylonish furnace. That priest had arms which could influence me: he
was naturally kind, with a sentimental French kindness, to whose
softness I knew myself not wholly impervious. Without respecting some
sorts of affection, there was hardly any sort having a fibre of root in
reality, which I could rely on my force wholly to withstand. Had I gone
to him, he would have shown me all that was tender, and comforting, and
gentle, in the honest Popish superstition. Then he would have tried to
kindle, blow and stir up in me the zeal of good works. I know not how
it would all have ended. We all think ourselves strong in some points;
we all know ourselves weak in many; the probabilities are that had I
visited Numero 10, Rue des Mages, at the hour and day appointed, I
might just now, instead of writing this heretic narrative, be counting
my beads in the cell of a certain Carmelite convent on the Boulevard of
Crécy, in Villette. There was something of Fénélon about that benign
old priest; and whatever most of his brethren may be, and whatever I
may think of his Church and creed (and I like neither), of himself I
must ever retain a grateful recollection. He was kind when I needed
kindness; he did me good. May Heaven bless him!

Twilight had passed into night, and the lamps were lit in the streets
ere I issued from that sombre church. To turn back was now become
possible to me; the wild longing to breathe this October wind on the
little hill far without the city walls had ceased to be an imperative
impulse, and was softened into a wish with which Reason could cope: she
put it down, and I turned, as I thought, to the Rue Fossette. But I had
become involved in a part of the city with which I was not familiar; it
was the old part, and full of narrow streets of picturesque, ancient,
and mouldering houses. I was much too weak to be very collected, and I
was still too careless of my own welfare and safety to be cautious; I
grew embarrassed; I got immeshed in a network of turns unknown. I was
lost and had no resolution to ask guidance of any passenger.

If the storm had lulled a little at sunset, it made up now for lost
time. Strong and horizontal thundered the current of the wind from
north-west to south-east; it brought rain like spray, and sometimes a
sharp hail, like shot: it was cold and pierced me to the vitals. I bent
my head to meet it, but it beat me back. My heart did not fail at all
in this conflict; I only wished that I had wings and could ascend the
gale, spread and repose my pinions on its strength, career in its
course, sweep where it swept. While wishing this, I suddenly felt
colder where before I was cold, and more powerless where before I was
weak. I tried to reach the porch of a great building near, but the mass
of frontage and the giant spire turned black and vanished from my eyes.
Instead of sinking on the steps as I intended, I seemed to pitch
headlong down an abyss. I remember no more.